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In the "new history OF capitalism," definitions of "capitalism" have been in short supply. As Seth Rockman, an architect of the field, writes, the work has had "minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism." Instead, historians have "let capitalism float as a placeholder while they look for ground-level evidence of a system in operation."2 This is partly by design. As Louis Hyman quipped in a roundtable on the subject, "defining capitalism is a bad idea. It is too deductive."3 From one perspective, the field has done well without definitions: its inductive, ground-level approach has facilitated historians' return to long neglected economic topics.4 But in the disciplinary borderlands of economic history, the "new history of capitalism" has produced little clarity and less collaboration.
The history of capitalism should be opening up opportunities for constructive dialogue between historians and economists, but thus far the opposite has been true. As before, the analysis of American slavery has become the main stage for emerging conflicts, sparking fights that are already taking on the virulent tone of a previous generation of debates.5 A recent paper by economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode takes historians to task for "mishandling historical evidence," imploring scholars to embrace "the enduring strengths of traditional historical scholarship."6 Their critiques and others point to valid shortcomings, but they also dismiss the achievements of the new literature, which has the potential to help us grapple with the power dynamics of modern capitalism in a way that narrower quantitative studies often miss.
Defining capitalism will not settle all of these debates, but it can prevent scholars from speaking past one another. More importantly, clarifying what we mean when we talk about capitalism will also clarify why we talk about capitalism.7 This essay unfolds in two stages: I begin by defining capitalism and then put my definition to work on the contested terrain of American slavery. The definition I offer focuses on the commoditization of labor as it results from the accumulation of capital. As I explain in the first half of this essay, my emphasis on commoditization seeks to generalize from definitions of capitalism based on wage labor. The centrality of wage labor to understanding capitalism has never been about the wage itself, but rather what...